Category: Movies

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Life Movies TV

My favorite TV shows, movies, and music* of 2023

Hong Kong sunset
My favorite sunset of 2023

*Also: favorite goal and save! Read on…

Following my post on the standout books I read this year, here’s the best of what I watched and listened to in 2023:

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— “Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street” (Netflix) This documentary series reinforced for me not just how shocking his crimes were, but how much his victims suffered.

— “Wham!” (Netflix) George Michael, Andrew Ridgeley, 80s pop music. What more do you need to know?

— “Beckham” (Netflix) An entertaining recap of David Beckham’s career, including the meme-spawning scene (YouTube link) with wife Victoria in which he presses her to admit that she enjoyed an advantaged upbringing.

— “Better Call Saul.” (AMC/Netflix) Though this series ended in 2022, I’m including it here since I finished it this year. A superb show that rivals even the great “Breaking Bad,” from which it was spun off.

🎥 Movies

“Oppenheimer.” Of course. Sprawling, ambitious, polished. Incredible soundscapes. Moves along crisply despite its three-hour length.

🎸 Music

The Hold Steady, “The Price of Progress.” Soaring rock anthems. (YouTube link)

Runner up: Buck Meek, “Haunted Mountain.” I’m in love with the title track (YouTube link).

⚽️ BONUS 1: Best Goal of the Year

As an Arsenal fan, I have to pick Bukayo Saka’s long-range stunner in a 3-2 win against Manchester United in January. (YouTube link)

🧤BONUS 2: And as a (gracefully aging) goalkeeper, I admired Aaron Ramsdale’s dive high to his right to save a deflected Mohamed Salah shot in a 2-2 Arsenal draw against Liverpool. (YouTube link) (Amazingly, Ramsdale’s now out of the side, but that’s a story for another time. Did I mention I’m an Arsenal fan?)

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Movies

‘Parasite’ — Yes, It’s That Good. You Should Watch It

You may have heard some buzz about “Parasite,” the film released earlier this year by acclaimed South Korean director Bong Joon-ho that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. It’s on many “Best films of 2019” lists.

I’m here to tell you: Yes, it’s that good.

You should watch it.

I loved one of Bong’s earlier films, the post-apocalyptic “Snowpiercer.”

“Parasite” is a comedic thriller about…well, lots of things. Class, wealth, society, family, fortune, secrets. Especially secrets.

Not only is the plot deliciously surprising, but the cinematography is gorgeous.

And unlike many modern films, it’s not inordinately long, running just over two hours, and is perfectly paced. Highly recommended. In theaters now.

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Movies

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh docu-series ‘Wild, Wild Country’ — Yes, It’s That Good

wild_wild_country_posterI really enjoyed the new Netflix docu-series “Wild Wild Country,” which you may have heard about. It was released last month and has been garnering some positive reviews and tons of online buzz.

It’s the story, told over six, hour-long episodes, of the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his devotees, known as Rajneeshis.

Thousands of the disciples, from both India and many other countries, followed him from India to the U.S., where they built a commune in the early 1980s outside a tiny town in Central Oregon.

The orange-clad followers clashed with locals and authorities before ultimately…well, you’ll have to give it a watch to see how it ends (if you don’t already know).

Some of the things I loved about the series:

  • The directors, Chapman and MacLain Way, manged to portray sympathetically not just members of the Bhagwan cult, but also the town’s residents, with many long interviews in which participants in the saga shared their first-person accounts. (Many were in the twenties or thirties during the time the events took place, so are now in their fifties or sixties.)
  • The series contains on a ton of contemporaneous footage, from local TV news accounts that aired at the time to what looks like footage shot by Rajneeshis themselves to document goings on at their commune.
  • The music is fantastic, really adding emotional content. (Some reviews I’ve read say the music is too overbearing, but I quite liked it.)

I’ve been digging around to try to learn more about the movement (don’t worry — just out of curiosity, not in a desire to join it!). Here are some resources I’ve found:

Update, April 7: Columbia Journalism Review has an interview with Les Zaitz, the Oregonian investigative reporter featured in the series.

He reveals what it was like report on the story, recounts his trip to India to learn more about Bhagwan and Sheela, and more. The close quote:

I’ve always been struck by just how dangerous and evil some of these people were. I’m not sure the Netflix series has accurately captured that. This was not just a group of people that lost their way. This was a very dangerous group that put a lot of lives at risk.

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Movies Tech

‘Arrival’: Yes, It’s That Good

Arrivalposter

You may have heard that “Arrival,” a thriller about an alien invasion based on a Ted Chiang short story, has been nominated for eight Oscars.

Yes, it’s that good.

Amy Adams, the protagonist, plays a linguist brought in by the U.S. government to try to communicate with mysterious beings, who have landed in pods around the world.

Longtime readers know how much I love sci-fi.

But this isn’t a hard-core, technologically heavy film. It’s beautifully shot, with exceptional sound, and is really more about life, time and — of course — language.

It’s not a perfect film, if you ask me, but it’s very good.

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Movies

Are Uncontacted Tribes Increasingly Emerging from the Wilderness?

2016 12 30 amazon

I recently watched a short, thought-provoking documentary on Netflix from U.K. broadcaster Channel 4 called “First Contact: Lost Tribe of the Amazon.”

It contains some captivating footage of uncontacted tribes in the Amazon, on both the Peruvian and Brazilian sides, emerging from the wilderness.

(Uncontacted people are those with no direct contact with civilization. In parts of the Amazon, laws set aside lands for such people, and forbid outsiders from interacting with them.)

The filmmaker, Angus Macqueen, has written online that the uncontacted people in the documentary have seemed motivated to change their behavior — to venture out of the wilderness — due to:

  1. A need to flee encroachment from illegal loggers and drug runners
  2. A desire to obtain materials they don’t have, like axes and clothing

In addition to raising ethical questions about governmental policies that intentionally keep such people isolated, where they lack basic medical care and often starve, I was wondering:

Are we seeing this phenomenon elsewhere? Is there something larger at play in our increasingly globalized the world? Are other uncontacted people also emerging?

I did a little research, and estimates suggest most uncontacted peoples are located in:

  1. the Amazon, and
  2. New Guinea

The film covers a pocket of the first, but as for the second, I haven’t been able to find any reports of uncontacted people in Asia increasingly venturing out of their lands.

This suggests to me that rather than a global trend, the film shows behavior that is indeed unique to the Amazon.

But maybe I’m missing something? I’ll have to keep investigating.

If you have any thoughts, drop me a line (n @ newley dot com) or leave a comment below.

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Movies

Top Lesser-Known (but Good) Sci-Fi Movies of 2016

Gizmodo has a list of good sci-fi films you might have missed this year.

The only one I’ve seen here is “Midnight Special,” which I thought was solid but not earth-shattering.

I must say I was surprised to see “Swiss Army Man,” which I mentioned back in April, listed here. I just couldn’t get past the trailer. But maybe it’s worth a watch?

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Life Movies Tech

Short Film: Guy Who Built Enormous Model Train Set

Some Kind Of Quest from Andrew Wilcox on Vimeo.

Embedded above is “Some Kind of Quest,” a short documentary about Bruce Zaccagnino and Northlandz, a 52,000-square-foot model train setup he created in New Jersey over a period of four years.

Dedication, pure and simple.

Related video: the Belgian gentleman who is really into marbles.

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Journalism Movies

Like ‘Making a Murderer’? Read This New Yorker Story

2016-01-28MAM

I’ve Tweeted about this and mentioned it in this week’s Newley’s Notes, and wanted to highlight it here, as well.

The Netflix documentary series “Making a Murderer” has been a smash hit, setting the Internet on fire, bringing renewed fame to the subject’s defense attorneys, and inspiring amateur sleuths the world over.

I have watched it. It is highly compelling.

The most imformative story I have read on the series is this Kathryn Schulz New Yorker piece.

In short, she points out that as a documentary, “Making a Murderer” falls short because it argues, rather than investigates:

Instead, the documentary consistently leads its viewers to the conclusion that Avery was framed by the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department, and it contains striking elisions that bolster that theory. The filmmakers minimize or leave out many aspects of Avery’s less than savory past, including multiple alleged incidents of physical and sexual violence. They also omit important evidence against him, including the fact that Brendan Dassey confessed to helping Avery move Halbach’s S.U.V. into his junk yard, where Avery lifted the hood and removed the battery cable. Investigators subsequently found DNA from Avery’s perspiration on the hood latch—evidence that would be nearly impossible to plant.

Perhaps because they are dodging inconvenient facts, Ricciardi and Demos are never able to present a coherent account of Halbach’s death, let alone multiple competing ones. Although “Making a Murderer” is structured chronologically, it fails to provide a clear time line of events, and it never answers such basic questions as when, where, and how Halbach died. Potentially critical issues are raised and summarily dropped; we hear about suspicious calls to and messages on Halbach’s cell phone, but these are never explored or even raised again. In the end, despite ten hours of running time, the story at the heart of “Making a Murderer” remains a muddle. Granted, real life is often a muddle, too, especially where crime is involved—but good reporters delineate the facts rather than contribute to the confusion.

Worth a read.

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Books Life Movies Sports

2015 Media Picks: My Favorite Book, Album, Movie, TV Show — and Goal and Save

2016-01-04harrisjpgBook: “Waking Up”

I read a lot of really great books this year, most of which were published prior to 2015.

The one that comes closest to qualifying for this list, however, since it was published in late 2014, is Sam Harris’s Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion.

Harris, a neuroscientist, illustrates that our perception of the world quite literally dictates the quality of our lives. He discusses eastern and western religions, consciousness, the illusion of the self, meditation, gurus, and psychedelic  drugs.

“Our minds are all we have,” he writes early on in the book. “They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others.”

Highly recommended.

Album: “Meamodern Sounds in Country Music”

2016-01-04_sturgillAgain, I’m kind of cheating here. Sturgill Simpson’s “Metamodern Sounds in Country Music” came out in mid-2014. But it’s too good to ignore. I blogged about it back in February.

Unfortunately, it’s not available on Spotify — my current pick for music streaming given Rdio’s demise and my brief but ultimaely ill-fated dalliance with Apple Music — but you can listen to it on Amazon or YouTube.

Movie: “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”

2016-01-04SWSerious “Star Wars” nerds may have their quibbles. But as a casual fan — as in, I like the movies, I really do, but I don’t live or die by them — I found “The Force Awakens” to be thrilling and fun.

It’s great to have the crew back again.

TV show: “Fargo”

2016-01-04fargoHoly shit, “Fargo.”

Season one was fantastic. And so was season two, which just concluded.

It seems crazy, the idea of replicating, for TV, the setting (mostly) for one of the finest films ever made. But it works. And there’s more to come!

Goal: Messi vs. Athetic Bilbao

Okay, so a goal represents the greatest achievement in the world’s greatest game (except for saving a penalty), and isn’t a piece of media, exactly. But it kind of is, when it’s reproduced. Like it is here. I don’t care.

THAT MESSI GOAL against Atheltic Bilbao, which I mentioned back in June, was outrageous:

Save: David De Gea vs. Everton

Again, we have to go back to late 2014, but it’s worth it.

As I blogged at the time, De Gea was exceptional against Everton. The save he pulls off at the one minute mark here is just…I’m speechless.

What a year.

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Movies Tech

Does Social Media Make TV a Better Entertainment Medium for Our Time than Film?

This snippet in Richard Brody’s recent New Yorker piece on the best movies of 2015 struck me:

The cinema’s self-conscious modernity arose when its makers put a virtual mirror into its lenses and revealed the filmmaking process in the films themselves. They reflected the world around the movie within the movie, the director on the screen. But television has outrun the cinema here, too, by replacing the mirror with an echo chamber; by means of social media, television has gone beyond reflexivity to become participatory. It has become its own story. “Transparent” isn’t about an elderly father who comes out as a transgender woman; it’s about the making of a show on that subject. “Mad Men” is about the making of a show about advertising people in the nineteen-sixties. Unlike movies, where reflexivity is a matter of aesthetics, TV has made it a matter of ethics, politics, and sociology.

Food for thought.